Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

by Hannah Arendt

Half a dozen psychiatrists had certified him as “normal”—“More normal, at any rate, than I am after having examined him,” one of them was said to have exclaimed, while another had found that his whole psychological outlook, his attitude toward his wife and children, mother and father, brothers, sisters, and friends, was “not only normal but most desirable”—and finally the minister who had paid regular visits to him in prison after the Supreme Court had finished hearing his appeal reassured everybody by declaring Eichmann to be “a man with very positive ideas.” Behind the comedy of the soul experts lay the hard fact that his was obviously no case of moral let alone legal insanity.

He would have been a model church-goer: dutiful, loyal, and conforming to normalcy to a degree bordering on stubbornness. But the love of 1 Corinthians 13 demands more than mere obedience.

And the judges did not believe him, because they were too good, and perhaps also too conscious of the very foundations of their profession, to admit that an average, “normal” person, neither feeble-minded nor indoctrinated nor cynical, could be perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong. They preferred to conclude from occasional lies that he was a liar—and missed the greatest moral and even legal challenge of the whole case. Their case rested on the assumption that the defendant, like all “normal persons,” must have been aware of the criminal nature of his acts, and Eichmann was indeed normal insofar as he was “no exception within the Nazi regime.” However, under the conditions of the Third Reich only “exceptions” could be expected to react “normally.” This simple truth of the matter created a dilemma for the judges which they could neither resolve nor escape.

suggested, first, that the war was no war; second, that it was started by destiny and not by Germany; and, third, that it was a matter of life and death for the Germans, who must annihilate their enemies or be annihilated.

These Hitlerian demagogic worldviews should strongly caution us to be wary of our own politicians. How many times have we heard that the country would be destroyed if the other side got elected, only to have it happen and the country continue on? This has happened since at least Washington's second term in office with Hamilton/John Adams Federalists vs. Jefferson/Madison Republicans.

Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a “monster,” but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.

Strauss asked a widely publicized and apparently very successful question of Mr. Brandt—“What were you doing those twelve years outside Germany? We know what we were doing here in Germany”—with complete impunity, without anybody’s batting an eye, let alone reminding the member of the Bonn government that what Germans in Germany were doing during those years has become notorious indeed.

For “it is indisputable that during the first stages of their Jewish policy the National Socialists thought it proper to adopt a pro-Zionist attitude” (Hans Lamm), and it was during these first stages that Eichmann learned his lessons about Jews.

“Wear it with Pride, the Yellow Star!,” the most popular slogan of these years, coined by Robert Weltsch, editor-in-chief of the Jüdische Rundschau, expressed the general emotional atmosphere.

the non-selected majority of Jews inevitably found themselves confronted with two enemies—the Nazi authorities and the Jewish authorities.

Polish and Rumanian governments left no doubt in their official proclamations that they, too, wished to be rid of their Jews. They could not understand why the world should get indignant if they followed in the footsteps of a “great and cultured nation.”

yes, he had a conscience, and his conscience functioned in the expected way for about four weeks, whereupon it began to function the other way around.

the participants in the anti-Hitler conspiracy of July, 1944, very rarely mentioned the wholesale massacres in the East in their correspondence or in the statements they prepared for use in the event that the attempt on Hitler’s life was successful, one is tempted to conclude that the Nazis greatly overestimated the practical importance of the problem.

conspirators quite a number of men who themselves were deeply implicated in the crimes of the regime—as

after he had heard of the failure of the attempt on Hitler’s life, which of course he regretted: “A little late, gentlemen, you who made this archdestroyer of Germany and ran after him, as long as everything seemed to be going well; you who ... without hesitation swore every oath demanded of you and reduced yourselves to the despicable flunkies of this criminal who is guilty of the murder of hundreds of thousands, burdened with the lamentations and the curse of the whole world; now you have betrayed him.... Now, when the bankruptcy can no longer be concealed, they betray the house that went broke, in order to establish a political alibi for themselves—the same men who have betrayed everything that was in the way of their claim to power.”

Goerdeler once appealed to Kluge’s “voice of conscience.” But all he meant was that even a general must understand that “to continue the war with no chance for victory was an obvious crime.” From the accumulated evidence one can only conclude that conscience as such had apparently got lost in Germany, and this to a point where people hardly remembered it and had ceased to realize that the surprising “new set of German values” was not shared by the outside world.

In other words, the massacres of ethnic groups were not included in appeals to conscience within the German state.

If, however, one examines the documents and prepared statements of the so-called “other Germany” that would have succeeded Hitler had the July 20 conspiracy succeeded, one can only marvel at how great a gulf separated even them from the rest of the world.

So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!

It has frequently been pointed out that the gassing of the mentally sick had to be stopped in Germany because of protests from the population and from a few courageous dignitaries of the churches, whereas no such protests were voiced when the program switched to the gassing of Jews, though some of the killing centers were located on what was then German territory and were surrounded by German populations.

And then she adds, surprisingly: ‘The Russians will never get us. The Führer will never permit it. Much sooner he will gas us.’ I look around furtively, but no one seems to find this statement out of the ordinary.”

Hence the undersecretaries and the legal and other experts in the various Ministries were frequently not even Party members, and Heydrich’s apprehensions about whether he would be able to enlist the active help of these people in mass murder were quite comprehensible. As Eichmann put it, Heydrich “expected the greatest difficulties.” Well, he could not have been more wrong.

“At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I felt free of all guilt.” Who was he to judge? Who was he “to have [his] own thoughts in this matter”? Well, he was neither the first nor the last to be ruined by modesty.

"Ruined by modesty." I found that to be one of the most piercing lessons of the entire book. Humility can be an escape from duty that the devil eagerly shows us and hurries us through, the underground railroad beneath to escape the path of moral courage above: the words we should say and the deeds we should do. The lesson: be humble enough to be "quick to hear, slow to speak", but do not allow the idea of humility to turn this into "quick to hear, speak not at all".

As Eichmann told it, the most potent factor in the soothing of his own conscience was the simple fact that he could see no one, no one at all, who actually was against the Final Solution.

This was true of even the Jews. While they knew they were being persecuted, for the most part the German Jews did not believe the Germans were engaging in mass slaughter.

he did not expect the Jews to share the general enthusiasm over their destruction, but he did expect more than compliance, he expected—and received, to a truly extraordinary degree—their cooperation.

the final rounding up of Jews in Berlin was, as I have mentioned, done entirely by Jewish police—there

Jewish officials could be trusted to compile the lists of persons and of their property, to secure money from the deportees to defray the expenses of their deportation and extermination, to keep track of vacated apartments, to supply police forces to help seize Jews and get them on trains, until, as a last gesture, they handed over the assets of the Jewish community in good order for final confiscation.

“with a hundred victims save a thousand people, with a thousand ten thousand.” The truth was even more gruesome. Dr. Kastner, in Hungary, for instance, saved exactly 1,684 people with approximately 476,000 victims.

they were voluntary “bearers of secrets,” either in order to assure quiet and prevent panic, as in Dr. Kastner’s case, or out of “humane” considerations, such as that “living in the expectation of death by gassing would only be the harder,” as in the case of Dr. Leo Baeck, former Chief Rabbi of Berlin. During the Eichmann trial, one witness pointed out the unfortunate consequences of this kind of “humanity”—people volunteered for deportation from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz and denounced those who tried to tell them the truth as being “not sane.”

believed Jewish policemen would be “more gentle and helpful” and would “make the ordeal easier” (whereas in fact they were, of course, more brutal and less corruptible, since so much more was at stake for them);

The well-known fact that the actual work of killing in the extermination centers was usually in the hands of Jewish commandos had been fairly and squarely established by witnesses for the prosecution—how they had worked in the gas chambers and the crematories, how they had pulled the gold teeth and cut the hair of the corpses, how they had dug the graves and, later, dug them up again to extinguish the traces of mass murder; how Jewish technicians had built gas chambers in Theresienstadt, where the Jewish “autonomy” had been carried so far that even the hangman was a Jew. But this was only horrible, it was no moral problem. The selection and classification of workers in the camps was made by the S.S., who had a marked predilection for the criminal elements;

If the person in question does not like what he is doing, the whole works will suffer.... We did our best to make everything somehow palatable.” No doubt they did; the problem is how it was possible for them to succeed.

“There are people here who say they were not told to escape. But fifty per cent of the people who escaped were captured and killed”—as compared with ninety-nine per cent, for those who did not escape. “Where could they have gone to? Where could they have fled?”—but he himself fled, to Rumania, because he was rich and Wisliceny helped him. “What could we have done? What could we have done?”

But the whole truth was that there existed Jewish community organizations and Jewish party and welfare organizations on both the local and the international level. Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.

the man was able to work his way up from lance corporal in the German Army to Führer of a people of almost eighty million.... His success alone proved to me that I should subordinate myself to this man.” His conscience was indeed set at rest when he saw the zeal and eagerness with which “good society” everywhere reacted as he did.

Clearly, the story of the “mitigators” in Hitler’s offices belongs among the postwar fairy tales,

“Did you try to influence him? Did you, as a clergyman, try to appeal to his feelings, preach to him, and tell him that his conduct was contrary to morality?” Of course, the very courageous Propst had done nothing of the sort, and his answers now were highly embarrassing. He said that “deeds are more effective than words,” and that “words would have been useless”; he spoke in clichés that had nothing to do with the reality of the situation,

The author goes on to point out that "mere words" would have been deeds, and that perhaps it was the duty of a clergyman to test the "uselessness of words". The author is not being sarcastic when she speaks of "the very courageous Propst"; he had indeed worked to save some Jews and had even tried to visit a concentration camp. The point isn't that he was faking courage, the point is that he had allowed certain ideas to subvert his courage when he misapplied them in certain situations.

“Nobody,” he repeated, “came to me and reproached me for anything in the performance of my duties.

The categories had been accepted without protest by German Jewry from the very beginning. And the acceptance of privileged categories—German Jews as against Polish Jews, war veterans and decorated Jews as against ordinary Jews, families whose ancestors were German-born as against recently naturalized citizens, etc.—had been the beginning of the moral collapse of respectable Jewish society.

“was a general practice to allow certain exceptions in order to be able to maintain the general rule all the more easily”

by being asked to make exceptions, and by occasionally granting them, and thus earning gratitude, they had convinced their opponents of the lawfulness of what they were doing.

Moreover, Propst Grüber and the Jerusalem court were quite mistaken in assuming that requests for exemptions originated only with opponents of the regime.

according to Himmler, there were “eighty million good Germans, each of whom has his decent Jew. It is clear, the others are pigs, but this particular Jew is first-rate”

There are more than a few people, especially among the cultural elite, who still publicly regret the fact that Germany sent Einstein packing, without realizing that it was a much greater crime to kill little Hans Cohn from around the corner, even though he was no genius.

he had helped a half-Jewish cousin, and a Jewish couple in Vienna for whom his uncle had intervened. This inconsistency still made him feel somewhat uncomfortable, and when he was questioned about it during cross-examination, he became openly apologetic: he had “confessed his sins” to his superiors.

He felt moral discomfort from this inconsistency in his dutiful obedience to his nation's law!

Eichmann’s position, therefore, showed a most unpleasant resemblance to that of the often-cited soldier who, acting in a normal legal framework, refuses to carry out orders that run counter to his ordinary experience of lawfulness and hence can be recognized by him as criminal.

In other words, when his superiors started scaling back the mass murder of Jews toward the end of the war, he refused to do so because he recognized their subversion of German law as a criminal act. This man did not hate Jews, he was simply a part of the bureaucracy of mass murder, a paper-pusher who dealt in transportation, a man on the conveyor line trying to keep things going even when others tried to sabotage what law and duty required.

To fall back on an unequivocal voice of conscience—or, in the even vaguer language of the jurists, on a “general sentiment of humanity” (Oppenheim-Lauterpacht in International Law, 1952)—not only begs the question, it signifies a deliberate refusal to take notice of the central moral, legal, and political phenomena of our century.

Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob, not to let their neighbors go off to their doom (for that the Jews were transported to their doom they knew, of course, even though many of them may not have known the gruesome details), and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.

there were still two hundred and fifty thousand Jews in the country, and they all survived the war. The Nazis, it turned out, possessed neither the manpower nor the will power to remain “tough” when they met determined opposition.

What he did not reckon with was that—quite apart from Danish resistance—the German officials who had been living in the country for years were no longer the same.

They had met resistance based on principle, and their “toughness” had melted like butter in the sun, they had even been able to show a few timid beginnings of genuine courage.

not a single one of them had the guts to defend the Nazi ideology.

Speaking of the Nazis put on trial after the war.

the deep, decisive differences between the totalitarian and the Fascist forms of government were never entirely understood by the world at large.